Neville’s Island

Trees, ferns and mist engulf the assembling audience. A patron in Row A bats away the thick mist that whirls round his seat. Setting is everything at the Ensemble: you’re so close to the action every small detail must work. Full marks then to Designer Hugh O’Connor for his impressive work on this comedy set on a small, uninhabited Tasmanian Island. 

When the cast arrive on stage they are absolutely drenched. Their boat has upturned, leaving this four-man team of dogged potential managers really water-logged and cross. Neville (David Lynch) is nominally in charge of these unready businessmen from a North Ryde mineral water company, though he has no idea what to do next. 

There’s Gordon (Chris Taylor), loud mouthed moaner who has lost his backpack overboard; Angus (Craig Reucassel), whose giant backpack, stocked by his wife, seems to hold everything that could ever be needed; and Roy (Andrew Hansen), a quiet God-fearing chap, who climbs trees to be closer to the native birds. These three actors have something in common — they have all appeared in ABC TV’s The Chaser (and similar shows). It says something for director Mark Kilmurry that he can rustle them up together for a theatrical season.

And they are excellent. Taylor moans and groans nonstop splendidly, Reucassel watches quietly and is laid low when his wife comes under critical examination, and Hansen is genuinely moving as a hymn-writing type who can get further back to nature than his fellows.

Lighting by Benjamin Brockman and multiple hoots and shrieks by Daryl Wallis add to the setting’s excellence. Writer Tim Firth (Calendar Girls, Kinky Boots, etc) made his mark with this play when it opened at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough in 1992. Played all around the world, it has been Australianised here, and most effectively.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Prudence Upton